Posts Tagged ‘analytics’

Recently we were approached by one of our clients who noticed he was getting a high volume of traffic to his site, however did not seem to be getting much in the way of leads or conversions. On closer inspection, his Analytics was giving him misleading false data, and I can guarantee that yours is doing exactly the same to you, so it’s worth having a look at.

When you log into your Google Anayltics dashboard and open up Reporting>Acquisiting>All Traffic>Referrals have a look down the list of referrals for any of these sites:

semalt.semalt.com

buttons-for-website.com

forum.topic31342700.darodar.com

make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com

anticrawler.org

What are these sites and why are they linking to your site?

They are not linking to you at all. These sites represent fake referrals. They are created in your Google Analytics account to trick you into visiting spamming websites. If you open on these URLs in your browser, you will likely to be redirected to an online store, marketing scam or malware site. Welcome to the world of Google Analytics Spam!

The biggest culprit at the moment is Semalt. Check out this very useful article that looks at Semalt in more detail. The bad news is that these sites an seriously mess up your metrics, giving you a completely inaccurate idea of how many visitors/referrals your site gets. The good news, is that you can block them. We put filters in place to ensure that the data you are seeing is more accurate.

Click here to see a very useful article that explains how to set up your own filters (though please read the instructions VERY CAREFULLY!), or get in touch with us for a quote and we will do the hard work for you.